Or is it?
Because maybe it’s too cheap.
Price is a story. A cheap price tells a different story than an expensive price.
It’s too cheap when your customer chooses the competition over you because the story your customer derives from the price has destroyed trust in your offer.
Price is also an enabler. Higher prices enable more premium offers.
It’s too expensive when the service you provide can’t live up to the story your customer derives from the price.
Our customers couldn’t – and shouldn’t – care less for how long it took us to make something. It’s our decision to spend the time and it’s our decision to make the offer. If we decide to offer our service or product to a customer, all our customer needs to know is whether our offer does what we promise it does.
They owe us for the result, not for the effort. If someone comes along who provides them with the same result but less effort or less experience, there’s no reason why a customer should pick us – let alone pay more because it took us 10 years to get to the point where we can make that job in 30 minutes.
Rather than focus our story on the experience we have, it’s much better to focus our story on the experience we give. Make that the best they have ever had … and our customers will stop worrying about why we charge what we charge.
A common approach to sales processes is to try to squeeze out the maximum price for an offer.
That’s because price is often an afterthought. There’s the product. And then there’s the price. The goal is to charge the highest possible price for the product and maximise the profit for the seller.
Yet, price is a story. People buy the price just as much as they buy other properties of our product. When they buy a premium priced product, they might tell themselves the story that deserve only the best. When they buy at a bargain, they might tell themselves the story about how clever they are. A million similar stories exist around price.
Thus, a different approach is to embrace that fact and treat price as one aspect of the product. The goal then is to try to squeeze out the maximum value for that price and maximise the value for the buyer.
What stories do your customers tell themselves around price? How can you deliver on that story and maximise the value?
